Comment by hardtke

One of the biggest problems in science (in general) is that your reputation and therefore funding is highly tied to a particular subfield. Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. If you try to move on to new areas of research, your reputation and funding are gone. The outcome is that areas of research interest become quasi-permanent, even when they are no longer interesting. I talk to the people today that still work in my specialty of nuclear physics (relativistic heavy ion physics) and I'm shocked at how little intellectual progress has been made. At the risk of offending people it's time to give up and declare victory, but the consequences would be dire (hundreds of professors all over the world without grants).